Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 2, 2025
A Confederacy of Toddlers
The United States is now a nation run by public servants who behave no better than internet trolls, deflecting criticism with crassness and obscenity. The White House press secretary answers a question from a member of the free press—a serious question about who planned a meeting between the American and Russian presidents—by saying, “Your mom did.” The secretary of defense cancels DEI and other policies by saying, “We are done with that shit.” The vice president calls an interlocutor on social media a “dipshit.” The president of the United States, during mass protests against his policies, responds by posting an AI-generated video of himself flying a jet fighter over his fellow citizens and dumping feces on their heads.
These are not the actions of mature adults. They are examples of crude people displaying their incompetence as they flail about in jobs—including the presidency—for which they are not qualified.
Friedrich Nietzsche created a concept that can help us understand this political moment. He imported a word from French to describe a kind of deep-seated anger that goes beyond transitory gripes: ressentiment, a feeling that comes from a combination of insecurity, an amorphous envy, and a generalized sense of resentment. Citizens engulfed by this emotion want to bring others down to what they think is their own underappreciated station and identify scapegoats to bear the blame for their misfortunes, real or imagined. They are driven by grievance and a continual, unfocused sense of injury. Accordingly, they see politics as a way to get even with almost everyone outside of their immediate circle. A Trump voter put out of work during the 2019 government shutdown captured this mentality when she exclaimed: “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
Sociologists and political scientists have long been aware of the effects of ressentiment on entire nations, not least because it is often a red flag: a marker of a society ripe for decay into authoritarianism. And that is where the danger lies in the juvenility and coarseness among both the Trump elite and its most loyal supporters, some of whom treat grave issues of national and even global importance as little more than raw material for mean-spirited jokes and obscene memes. This shallow behavior leads to a deadening of the moral and civic spirit that undergirds democracy. (...)
What can other American citizens do when faced with a government that offers trolling and obscenity as replacements for governing? How do people who care about democracy and the rule of law deal with fellow voters who keep electing a class of public officials who seem to be all id and no superego?
Perhaps most important, other Americans should model the behavior they hope to foster in their friends and neighbors. Populist ressentiment is not necessarily produced by inequality. It’s driven by a perception of inequality, a sense of being looked down on by others. It is a demand for attention and emotional engagement. But trying to answer that demand is a fool’s errand: On social media, for example, some of Trump’s voters seem especially enraged not by arguments but by indifference. The whole point of their trolling is to gain attention and then intimidate others.
Both online and in daily life, Americans who are part of the pro-democracy coalition should resist such invitations. Responsible citizens must hold themselves to a higher standard than officials who are acting like grade-schoolers. The national figures, from Trump on down, who put out rancid bait may do so because they want others to argue and lower themselves, and thus prove that no one holds the moral high ground. (Perhaps this is why Trump and so many of his supporters resort to whataboutism when confronted with their behavior.) When these leaders and their followers swear or behave rudely, they may hope and expect that others will do likewise.
As tempting as it is to trade punches to the groin, the better approach is to model mature behavior and demand it in return from people being paid to serve the public. When the White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt answered the journalist S. V. Dáte’s text-message question about who chose the location of a possible U.S.-Russia summit with “Your mom did,” Dáte texted back: “Is this funny to you?” Leavitt then went full Regina George, calling him a “far left hack” and refusing to answer his “bullshit questions.” Leavitt later posted the exchange on X, where Dáte responded: “Feel better now? Now can you answer the question? Please and thank you.” That’s the only way to go: Ask the question, and then ask it again, and keep asking.
This is not Michelle Obama’s “When they go low, we go high” argument. (Even she seems to have abandoned that strategy.) Rather, it is a recognition—and a plea—that the voters and candidates who wish to replace this current government must present themselves as stable, responsible, and adult alternatives to a claque of trolls and incompetents.
[ed. Get in losers, we're going losing. See also: We Do Not Live in a Society:]
Since this story aired, I have been asking myself what kind of society we live in where something like this could happen. Where racists are completely unafraid to be racist and where you can get rich by being the most despicable type of person alive. Where sitting congressmen can openly call for Gaza to starve. Where attacking vulnerable trans kids can make you famous. The tenuous social fabric that we once had doesn’t actually seem to exist at all. There is no concept of a social contract. We don’t believe we have any responsibility to each other. We do not work together. We have no shared identity. We have no common goals. Simply put, we do not live in a society.
The republic will not fall because Vice President J. D. Vance has decided that swearing is edgy, and the juvenility of American public life did not begin with the Trump administration. But the larger danger under all of this nastiness is that President Donald Trump and his courtiers are using crass deflection and gleeful immaturity as means of numbing society and wearing down its resistance to all kinds of depredations, including corruption and violence. When the U.S. military kills people at sea and Vance, responding to a charge that such actions might be war crimes, responds, “I don’t give a shit what you call it,” the goal is not just to boost Vance’s hairy-chest cred; it’s also to grind others down into accepting the idea of extrajudicial executions.
The collapse of a superpower into a regime of bullies and mean girls and comic-book guys explains much about why American democracy is on the ropes, reeling from the attacks of people who in a better time would never have been allowed near the government of the United States.
For years, Trump has attracted acolytes by being the patron saint of the third string, gathering people who seem to feel, for various reasons, that they were iced out of national politics. Some hold opinions too extreme for any but a Trump administration. Stephen Miller’s odious views, including his echoing of Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric and his accusation that the president’s critics are terrorists, would make him a liability not just in any other administration but even at a family dinner, as remarks from some of his own relatives have suggested.
Other Trump appointees, however, have used personal loyalty as the bridge across the chasm that separates their lack of ability from the jobs they occupy. The experiences of prior Trump appointees suggest that many of the current crew know they are in over their head, which could explain much about their churlish and unprofessional behavior.
Consider the candid admissions of Stephanie Grisham, a press secretary in Trump’s first term who later walked away from Trump. In 2021, she explained to New York magazine why she took the job in the first place.
This kind of private insecurity can manifest in public life as childishness and trollishness. Or maybe such behavior is simply a reflection of the man at the top. Like all schoolyard bullies, Trump is crude and surrounds himself with people who will not challenge him. Thus his appointees, instead of rising to their responsibilities as public servants, emulate their boss’s shallow swagger. Instead of advising the president, they seek to placate him. Instead of showing leadership, they replace their own dignity with loyalty to Trump and do whatever it takes to stay out of the Eye of Sauron.
Whatever the reason for their immaturity, the effect is miserable policy and a corroded democracy. The public is poorly served and does not get answers to important questions. Tariffs? Inflation? Immigration? Peace or war? Who’s responsible for these choices?
Your mother, apparently.
The corruption, mendacity, and incompetence of those in charge are perhaps less astonishing than the willingness of Trump’s most loyal supporters to tolerate them all. By now, any other president would have been restrained by Congress or, as happened in 2020, by voters. In Trump’s second term, however, his base seems almost eager to forgive him for anything, with the possible exception of his involvement with the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. (...)
Perhaps Trump’s voters have become like the members of the administration, delighting in the crassness and obscenity that pours out of the president and his circle whenever they are challenged. (...)
The collapse of a superpower into a regime of bullies and mean girls and comic-book guys explains much about why American democracy is on the ropes, reeling from the attacks of people who in a better time would never have been allowed near the government of the United States.
For years, Trump has attracted acolytes by being the patron saint of the third string, gathering people who seem to feel, for various reasons, that they were iced out of national politics. Some hold opinions too extreme for any but a Trump administration. Stephen Miller’s odious views, including his echoing of Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric and his accusation that the president’s critics are terrorists, would make him a liability not just in any other administration but even at a family dinner, as remarks from some of his own relatives have suggested.
Other Trump appointees, however, have used personal loyalty as the bridge across the chasm that separates their lack of ability from the jobs they occupy. The experiences of prior Trump appointees suggest that many of the current crew know they are in over their head, which could explain much about their churlish and unprofessional behavior.
Consider the candid admissions of Stephanie Grisham, a press secretary in Trump’s first term who later walked away from Trump. In 2021, she explained to New York magazine why she took the job in the first place.
For people like me—and I’m not proud of this—you have a sick sense of pride. All the people who told you how terrible he was? You’re like, Oh? He’s the nominee, buddy! I’m not proud of that. And then he wins, and you get into the White House, and you’re in the White House.To be fair, many reasonable people have the same kind of awestruck moment when they arrive in Washington. (I certainly felt overwhelmed many years ago when I showed up for my first day of work in the Senate.) But Grisham admits to a deeper insecurity: “I thought that they”—the Trump team—“were the only ones who would ever get me there. My lack of confidence in myself as a single mother and someone who has made mistakes in my past, I thought, Well, this is my only shot. Nobody’s gonna ever want me, really, but these people did. So I’ll stick around.”
This kind of private insecurity can manifest in public life as childishness and trollishness. Or maybe such behavior is simply a reflection of the man at the top. Like all schoolyard bullies, Trump is crude and surrounds himself with people who will not challenge him. Thus his appointees, instead of rising to their responsibilities as public servants, emulate their boss’s shallow swagger. Instead of advising the president, they seek to placate him. Instead of showing leadership, they replace their own dignity with loyalty to Trump and do whatever it takes to stay out of the Eye of Sauron.
Whatever the reason for their immaturity, the effect is miserable policy and a corroded democracy. The public is poorly served and does not get answers to important questions. Tariffs? Inflation? Immigration? Peace or war? Who’s responsible for these choices?
Your mother, apparently.
The corruption, mendacity, and incompetence of those in charge are perhaps less astonishing than the willingness of Trump’s most loyal supporters to tolerate them all. By now, any other president would have been restrained by Congress or, as happened in 2020, by voters. In Trump’s second term, however, his base seems almost eager to forgive him for anything, with the possible exception of his involvement with the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. (...)
Perhaps Trump’s voters have become like the members of the administration, delighting in the crassness and obscenity that pours out of the president and his circle whenever they are challenged. (...)
Friedrich Nietzsche created a concept that can help us understand this political moment. He imported a word from French to describe a kind of deep-seated anger that goes beyond transitory gripes: ressentiment, a feeling that comes from a combination of insecurity, an amorphous envy, and a generalized sense of resentment. Citizens engulfed by this emotion want to bring others down to what they think is their own underappreciated station and identify scapegoats to bear the blame for their misfortunes, real or imagined. They are driven by grievance and a continual, unfocused sense of injury. Accordingly, they see politics as a way to get even with almost everyone outside of their immediate circle. A Trump voter put out of work during the 2019 government shutdown captured this mentality when she exclaimed: “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
Sociologists and political scientists have long been aware of the effects of ressentiment on entire nations, not least because it is often a red flag: a marker of a society ripe for decay into authoritarianism. And that is where the danger lies in the juvenility and coarseness among both the Trump elite and its most loyal supporters, some of whom treat grave issues of national and even global importance as little more than raw material for mean-spirited jokes and obscene memes. This shallow behavior leads to a deadening of the moral and civic spirit that undergirds democracy. (...)
What can other American citizens do when faced with a government that offers trolling and obscenity as replacements for governing? How do people who care about democracy and the rule of law deal with fellow voters who keep electing a class of public officials who seem to be all id and no superego?
Perhaps most important, other Americans should model the behavior they hope to foster in their friends and neighbors. Populist ressentiment is not necessarily produced by inequality. It’s driven by a perception of inequality, a sense of being looked down on by others. It is a demand for attention and emotional engagement. But trying to answer that demand is a fool’s errand: On social media, for example, some of Trump’s voters seem especially enraged not by arguments but by indifference. The whole point of their trolling is to gain attention and then intimidate others.
Both online and in daily life, Americans who are part of the pro-democracy coalition should resist such invitations. Responsible citizens must hold themselves to a higher standard than officials who are acting like grade-schoolers. The national figures, from Trump on down, who put out rancid bait may do so because they want others to argue and lower themselves, and thus prove that no one holds the moral high ground. (Perhaps this is why Trump and so many of his supporters resort to whataboutism when confronted with their behavior.) When these leaders and their followers swear or behave rudely, they may hope and expect that others will do likewise.
As tempting as it is to trade punches to the groin, the better approach is to model mature behavior and demand it in return from people being paid to serve the public. When the White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt answered the journalist S. V. Dáte’s text-message question about who chose the location of a possible U.S.-Russia summit with “Your mom did,” Dáte texted back: “Is this funny to you?” Leavitt then went full Regina George, calling him a “far left hack” and refusing to answer his “bullshit questions.” Leavitt later posted the exchange on X, where Dáte responded: “Feel better now? Now can you answer the question? Please and thank you.” That’s the only way to go: Ask the question, and then ask it again, and keep asking.
This is not Michelle Obama’s “When they go low, we go high” argument. (Even she seems to have abandoned that strategy.) Rather, it is a recognition—and a plea—that the voters and candidates who wish to replace this current government must present themselves as stable, responsible, and adult alternatives to a claque of trolls and incompetents.
by Tom Nichols, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: The Atlantic/bgwalker/Getty[ed. Get in losers, we're going losing. See also: We Do Not Live in a Society:]
***
Last week a video went viral of a woman at a playground in Rochester, Minnesota calling an autistic 5-year-old boy a n*****. When she was identified, instead of expressing contrition she doubled down, launching a fundraiser on GiveSendGo (a website touted as the “Christian” alternative to Go Fund Me) to “protect her family”. She has, as of this writing, raised over $700,000. Many of the donors have usernames like “Adolf”, “The fourteen words” and “Fig R Naggot”. It appears that in the United States in 2025, calling a little kid a slur is an infinite wealth hack. While the right wing lavishing morally repugnant people with money is nothing new, it does feel like a few short years ago conservatives would’ve felt pressure to condemn this. Not anymore. Not only are random internet Nazis making this woman rich, right wing pundits are expressing support for her. Something hideous that was always under the surface in the American political body has finally been unleashed, mask off, with no fear for consequences.Since this story aired, I have been asking myself what kind of society we live in where something like this could happen. Where racists are completely unafraid to be racist and where you can get rich by being the most despicable type of person alive. Where sitting congressmen can openly call for Gaza to starve. Where attacking vulnerable trans kids can make you famous. The tenuous social fabric that we once had doesn’t actually seem to exist at all. There is no concept of a social contract. We don’t believe we have any responsibility to each other. We do not work together. We have no shared identity. We have no common goals. Simply put, we do not live in a society.
Sunday, November 30, 2025
Pete Hegseth: Kill Everybody
[ed. Another day, another atrocity (more so if you count Republican spinelessness and knee-jerk support for anything this administration does, including committing war crimes). See also: November 29, 2025 (LFAA); and, Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all (WaPo):]
The alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat of attack against the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has tried to argue, in an “armed conflict” with the U.S., these officials and experts say. Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any of the men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign.
***
As two men clung to a stricken, burning ship targeted by SEAL Team 6, the Joint Special Operations commander followed the defense secretary’s order to leave no survivors. (...)The alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat of attack against the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has tried to argue, in an “armed conflict” with the U.S., these officials and experts say. Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any of the men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign.
Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Huntley, now director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.
***
"Perhaps Hegseth thinks that sinking boats on the high seas is funny. Maybe he just wanted to own the libs and all that. Or maybe he thought he could disrupt the gathering war crimes narrative, like the school delinquent pulling a fire alarm during an exam. Or maybe he just has poor judgment and even worse impulse control (which would explain a lot of things about Pete Hegseth). No matter the reason, his choice to trivialize the use of American military force reveals both the shallowness of the man’s character and the depth of his contempt for the military as an institution.
Posting stupid memes after being accused of murder is not the response of a patriot who must answer to the public about the security of the United States and its people in uniform. It is not the response of a secretary of defense who values the advice of the officers who report to him. It is not the response of a human being who comprehends the risks—and the costs—of ordering other people to kill helpless men clinging to the wreck of a boat."
Posting stupid memes after being accused of murder is not the response of a patriot who must answer to the public about the security of the United States and its people in uniform. It is not the response of a secretary of defense who values the advice of the officers who report to him. It is not the response of a human being who comprehends the risks—and the costs—of ordering other people to kill helpless men clinging to the wreck of a boat."
This all prompted me to look at his Wikipedia entry, something I haven't had the stomach to do until now. What a piece of work.]
Tuesday, November 25, 2025
The Prospects For Left-Wing Populism
An easy way to distinguish a populist appeal from a technocratic one is that the populist message will restrict itself entirely to primary representations. For example, the “cost of living” is not a primary representation, it is an abstract concept. The price of groceries, on the other hand, is a primary representation – everyone can easily summon up an image of the price, on the supermarket shelf, the last time they bought orange juice or bread. This is, of course, something that Trump spent a great deal of time talking about (“groceries, such a simple word”), and that the Brahmin left in America spent a great deal of time making fun of him for (e.g. here). In so doing, they exhibited a sort of higher-order stupidity. As Stanovich observes, the thing about primary representations is that they have a “special salience” that abstract concepts will never possess. (...)
From this analysis, one can see also why the Bernie/AOC “billionaires are bad” pitch is not genuine populism. The problem with criticizing inequality is that inequality is another abstraction, one that only intellectuals care about per se. There’s lots of research showing that most people have no idea what the distribution of income and wealth is in their society, in part because they don’t really care. What they do care about, first and foremost, is their own financial situation. To the extent that they are bothered by what others have, their attitudes are based on comparison to a specific reference group. They pick out an individual or group who is thought to be comparably situated to themselves (e.g. neighbours, high-school classmates, siblings, etc.), who then serve as a source of primary representations. They judge their own level of success and material comfort based on how well their situation compares to that of these people. (Hence the kernel of truth at the heart of H. L. Mencken’s observation that a truly wealthy man is one who earns more than his wife’s sister’s husband.) The problem with complaining about Jeff Bezos’s yacht, or Elon Musk’s effective tax rate, as a political strategy, is that these people are completely outside the reference class of all but a small handful of Americans. As a result, their financial situation is completely incommensurable with that of the average person. It is very difficult to cultivate resentment, or any other strong feeling, by inviting people to contemplate an abstraction.
In order to do populism effectively, politicians must not only focus on problems that the public cares about, they must also by-and-large accept the public’s framing of those problems. This creates a dilemma for the left, because that framing, in a complex modern society, will usually be incorrect. As a result, it is extremely difficult to find issues on which left-wing politicians can be authentically populist.
In order to do populism effectively, politicians must not only focus on problems that the public cares about, they must also by-and-large accept the public’s framing of those problems. This creates a dilemma for the left, because that framing, in a complex modern society, will usually be incorrect. As a result, it is extremely difficult to find issues on which left-wing politicians can be authentically populist.
by Joeseph Heath, In Due Course | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Sounds about right. See also: Why We Never Hear About the Countries Where Socialism Works (Amie Boakye).]
When most people hear the word socialism, the first images that flash across their minds are grim ones: long bread lines in the Soviet Union, economic collapse in Venezuela, or repression in Cuba. In popular Western discourse, socialism has been painted as synonymous with failure, inefficiency, and authoritarianism. The narrative is so ingrained that even those who’ve never studied political theory or looked closely at history reflexively think socialism equals poverty.
But here’s the paradox: many countries around the world have quietly, effectively integrated socialist principles into their political and economic systems. And they are thriving. These nations often rank among the happiest, healthiest, and most educated societies on Earth. So why don’t we hear about them? Why do their successes stay in the shadows while the failures dominate headlines?
The short answer: power, perception, and politics.
Before diving into examples, it’s important to define what socialism means in practice, because the word itself has become a linguistic battlefield. For some, socialism means full state control over production and distribution. For others, it’s a mixed economy where public services like healthcare, education, and infrastructure are guaranteed, while markets handle the rest.
In reality, modern socialism often looks less like Soviet central planning and more like a robust safety net combined with democratic governance. It’s universal healthcare in Sweden, tuition-free universities in Finland, and public housing in Vienna. It’s not the abolition of markets, but the idea that essential services should be protected from market failure.
That distinction matters. Because much of the West’s fear-mongering about socialism rests on outdated caricatures.
When most people hear the word socialism, the first images that flash across their minds are grim ones: long bread lines in the Soviet Union, economic collapse in Venezuela, or repression in Cuba. In popular Western discourse, socialism has been painted as synonymous with failure, inefficiency, and authoritarianism. The narrative is so ingrained that even those who’ve never studied political theory or looked closely at history reflexively think socialism equals poverty.
But here’s the paradox: many countries around the world have quietly, effectively integrated socialist principles into their political and economic systems. And they are thriving. These nations often rank among the happiest, healthiest, and most educated societies on Earth. So why don’t we hear about them? Why do their successes stay in the shadows while the failures dominate headlines?
The short answer: power, perception, and politics.
Before diving into examples, it’s important to define what socialism means in practice, because the word itself has become a linguistic battlefield. For some, socialism means full state control over production and distribution. For others, it’s a mixed economy where public services like healthcare, education, and infrastructure are guaranteed, while markets handle the rest.
In reality, modern socialism often looks less like Soviet central planning and more like a robust safety net combined with democratic governance. It’s universal healthcare in Sweden, tuition-free universities in Finland, and public housing in Vienna. It’s not the abolition of markets, but the idea that essential services should be protected from market failure.
That distinction matters. Because much of the West’s fear-mongering about socialism rests on outdated caricatures.
Saturday, November 22, 2025
What Does China Want?
Abstract
The conventional wisdom is that China is a rising hegemon eager to replace the United States, dominate international institutions, and re-create the liberal international order in its own image. Drawing on data from 12,000 articles and hundreds of speeches by Xi Jinping, to discern China's intentions we analyze three terms or phrases from Chinese rhetoric: “struggle” (斗争), “rise of the East, decline of the West” (东升西降), and “no intention to replace the United States” ((无意取代美国). Our findings indicate that China is a status quo power concerned with regime stability and is more inwardly focused than externally oriented. China's aims are unambiguous, enduring, and limited: It cares about its borders, sovereignty, and foreign economic relations. China's main concerns are almost all regional and related to parts of China that the rest of the region has agreed are Chinese—Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang. Our argument has three main implications. First, China does not pose the type of military threat that the conventional wisdom claims it does. Thus, a hostile U.S. military posture in the Pacific is unwise and may unnecessarily create tensions. Second, the two countries could cooperate on several overlooked issue areas. Third, the conventional view of China plays down the economic and diplomatic arenas that a war-fighting approach is unsuited to address.
There is much about China that is disturbing for the West. China's gross domestic product grew from $1.2 trillion in 2000 to $17 trillion in 2023. Having modernized the People's Liberation Army over the past generation, China is also rapidly increasing its stockpile of nuclear warheads. China spends almost $300 billion annually on defense. Current leader Xi Jinping has consolidated power and appears set to rule the authoritarian Communist country indefinitely. Chinese firms often engage in questionable activities, such as restricting data, inadequately enforcing intellectual property rights, and engaging in cyber theft. The Chinese government violates human rights and restricts numerous personal freedoms for its citizens. In violation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), every country in the region, including China, is reclaiming land and militarizing islets in the disputed East and South China Seas. In short, China poses many potential problems to the United States and indeed to the world.
In U.S. academic and policymaking circles, the conventional wisdom is that China wants to dominate the world and expand its territory. For example, Elbridge Colby, deputy assistant secretary of defense during Donald Trump's first term and undersecretary of defense for Trump's second term, writes: “If China could subjugate Taiwan, it could then lift its gaze to targets farther afield … a natural next target for Beijing would be the Philippines … Vietnam, although not a U.S. ally, might also make a good target.” (...) The then–U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said in 2022 that “China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.” Trump's former U.S. trade representative, Robert Lithgizer, claims that “China to me is an existential threat to the United States…. China views itself as number one in the world and wants to be that way.”
These assessments of China's intentions lead mainstream U.S. scholars and policy analysts from both the Left and the Right to policy prescriptions that will take generations to unfold, and that are almost completely focused on war-fighting, deterrence, and decoupling from China. Those who believe in this China threat call for increasing U.S. military expenditures and showing “resolve” toward China. The conventional wisdom also advocates a regional expansion of alliances with any country, democratic or authoritarian, that could join the United States to contain China. As Colby writes, “This is a book about war.” Brands and Beckley argue that the United States should reinforce its efforts to deter China from invading Taiwan: “What is needed is a strategy to deter or perhaps win a conflict in the 2020s … the Pentagon can dramatically raise the costs of a Chinese invasion by turning the international waters of the Taiwan Strait into a death trap for attacking forces.” Doshi argues that the United States should arm countries such as “Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and India” with capabilities to contain China.
This leads to a key question: What does China want? To answer this question, this article examines contemporary China's goals and fears in words and deeds. In contrast to the conventional view, the evidence provided in this article leads to one overarching conclusion and three specific observations. Overall, China is a status quo power concerned with regime stability, and it remains more inwardly focused than externally oriented. More specifically: China's aims are unambiguous; China's aims are enduring; and China's aims are limited.
First, China's aims are unambiguous: China cares about its borders, its sovereignty, and its foreign economic relations. China cares about its unresolved borders in the East and South China Seas and with India, respectively. Almost all of its concerns are regional. Second, China deeply cares about its sovereign rights over various parts of China that the rest of the region has agreed are Chinese—Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang. Third, China has an increasingly clear economic strategy for its relations with both East Asia and the rest of the world that aims to expand trade and economic relations, not reduce them.
It is also clear what China does not want: There is little mention in Chinese discourse of expansive goals or ambitions for global leadership and hegemony. Furthermore, China is not exporting ideology. Significantly, the CCP's emphasis on “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is not a generalized model for the world. In contrast, the United States claims to represent global values and norms. What China also does not want is to invade and conquer other countries; there is no evidence that China poses an existential threat to the countries on its borders or in its region that it does not already claim sovereignty over.
We explore how China views its own position and role in the region and globally. Recognizing that public statements vary in their level of authoritativeness, we examined three main sources: People's Daily, which represents not only the state but also the Central Committee of the CCP; Xi Jinping's and other senior officials' speeches; and Qiushi, a magazine publicizing the CCP's latest policy directions. We used computer-assisted text analysis to systematically assess China's stated goals over time. This method allowed us to more accurately track China's concerns and identify how they have changed. We also show that China's top leaders consistently reiterate that China does not seek regional hegemony or aim to compete with the United States for global supremacy. Instead, China views international relations as multilateral and cooperative.
Second, China's aims are inherited and enduring, not new. There is a “trans-dynastic” Chinese identity: Almost every major issue that the People's Republic of China (PRC) cares about today dates back to at least the nineteenth century during the Qing dynasty. These are not new goals that emerged after the Communist victory in 1949, and none of China's core interests were created by Xi. These are enduring Chinese concerns, even though the political authority governing China has changed dramatically and multiple times over the past two hundred years or more.
Third, what China wants is limited, even though its power has rapidly expanded over the past generation. China's claims and goals are either being resolved or remain static. This reality is in contrast to many of the expectations of U.S. policymakers and to the conventional wisdom of the international relations scholarly literature, which maintains that states' interests will grow as power grows. Rather, the evidence shows that the Chinese leadership is concerned about internal challenges more than external threats or expansion.
We find that China does not pose the type of military threat that the conventional wisdom claims it does. Consequently, there is no need for a hostile military posture in the Pacific, and indeed the United States may be unnecessarily creating tensions. Just as important, we suggest that there is room for the two countries to cooperate on a number of issues areas that are currently overlooked. Finally, the conventional view of China de-emphasizes the economic and diplomatic arenas that a war-fighting approach is unsuited to address. The conventional wisdom about U.S. grand strategy is problematic, and the vision of China that exists in Washington is dangerously wrong.
This article proceeds as follows. First, we discuss the conventional wisdom regarding China's goals as represented by top policymakers in the United States and in the existing scholarly literature. The second section examines Chinese rhetoric and points out nuances in how to read and interpret Chinese rhetoric. The third section uses quantitative methods to more systematically and accurately assess Chinese claims across time as reflected in the most authoritative Chinese pronouncements. The fourth section details how China's main priorities are enduring and trans-dynastic, and the fifth section shows how the most important of these claims are not expanding, even though China's power has grown rapidly over the past generation. We present the implications of our argument for the U.S.-China relationship in the conclusion.
by David C. Kang, Jackie S. H. Wong, Zenobia T. Chan, MIT Press | Read more:
Image: via
The conventional wisdom is that China is a rising hegemon eager to replace the United States, dominate international institutions, and re-create the liberal international order in its own image. Drawing on data from 12,000 articles and hundreds of speeches by Xi Jinping, to discern China's intentions we analyze three terms or phrases from Chinese rhetoric: “struggle” (斗争), “rise of the East, decline of the West” (东升西降), and “no intention to replace the United States” ((无意取代美国). Our findings indicate that China is a status quo power concerned with regime stability and is more inwardly focused than externally oriented. China's aims are unambiguous, enduring, and limited: It cares about its borders, sovereignty, and foreign economic relations. China's main concerns are almost all regional and related to parts of China that the rest of the region has agreed are Chinese—Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang. Our argument has three main implications. First, China does not pose the type of military threat that the conventional wisdom claims it does. Thus, a hostile U.S. military posture in the Pacific is unwise and may unnecessarily create tensions. Second, the two countries could cooperate on several overlooked issue areas. Third, the conventional view of China plays down the economic and diplomatic arenas that a war-fighting approach is unsuited to address.
In U.S. academic and policymaking circles, the conventional wisdom is that China wants to dominate the world and expand its territory. For example, Elbridge Colby, deputy assistant secretary of defense during Donald Trump's first term and undersecretary of defense for Trump's second term, writes: “If China could subjugate Taiwan, it could then lift its gaze to targets farther afield … a natural next target for Beijing would be the Philippines … Vietnam, although not a U.S. ally, might also make a good target.” (...) The then–U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said in 2022 that “China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.” Trump's former U.S. trade representative, Robert Lithgizer, claims that “China to me is an existential threat to the United States…. China views itself as number one in the world and wants to be that way.”
These assessments of China's intentions lead mainstream U.S. scholars and policy analysts from both the Left and the Right to policy prescriptions that will take generations to unfold, and that are almost completely focused on war-fighting, deterrence, and decoupling from China. Those who believe in this China threat call for increasing U.S. military expenditures and showing “resolve” toward China. The conventional wisdom also advocates a regional expansion of alliances with any country, democratic or authoritarian, that could join the United States to contain China. As Colby writes, “This is a book about war.” Brands and Beckley argue that the United States should reinforce its efforts to deter China from invading Taiwan: “What is needed is a strategy to deter or perhaps win a conflict in the 2020s … the Pentagon can dramatically raise the costs of a Chinese invasion by turning the international waters of the Taiwan Strait into a death trap for attacking forces.” Doshi argues that the United States should arm countries such as “Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and India” with capabilities to contain China.
This leads to a key question: What does China want? To answer this question, this article examines contemporary China's goals and fears in words and deeds. In contrast to the conventional view, the evidence provided in this article leads to one overarching conclusion and three specific observations. Overall, China is a status quo power concerned with regime stability, and it remains more inwardly focused than externally oriented. More specifically: China's aims are unambiguous; China's aims are enduring; and China's aims are limited.
First, China's aims are unambiguous: China cares about its borders, its sovereignty, and its foreign economic relations. China cares about its unresolved borders in the East and South China Seas and with India, respectively. Almost all of its concerns are regional. Second, China deeply cares about its sovereign rights over various parts of China that the rest of the region has agreed are Chinese—Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang. Third, China has an increasingly clear economic strategy for its relations with both East Asia and the rest of the world that aims to expand trade and economic relations, not reduce them.
It is also clear what China does not want: There is little mention in Chinese discourse of expansive goals or ambitions for global leadership and hegemony. Furthermore, China is not exporting ideology. Significantly, the CCP's emphasis on “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is not a generalized model for the world. In contrast, the United States claims to represent global values and norms. What China also does not want is to invade and conquer other countries; there is no evidence that China poses an existential threat to the countries on its borders or in its region that it does not already claim sovereignty over.
We explore how China views its own position and role in the region and globally. Recognizing that public statements vary in their level of authoritativeness, we examined three main sources: People's Daily, which represents not only the state but also the Central Committee of the CCP; Xi Jinping's and other senior officials' speeches; and Qiushi, a magazine publicizing the CCP's latest policy directions. We used computer-assisted text analysis to systematically assess China's stated goals over time. This method allowed us to more accurately track China's concerns and identify how they have changed. We also show that China's top leaders consistently reiterate that China does not seek regional hegemony or aim to compete with the United States for global supremacy. Instead, China views international relations as multilateral and cooperative.
Second, China's aims are inherited and enduring, not new. There is a “trans-dynastic” Chinese identity: Almost every major issue that the People's Republic of China (PRC) cares about today dates back to at least the nineteenth century during the Qing dynasty. These are not new goals that emerged after the Communist victory in 1949, and none of China's core interests were created by Xi. These are enduring Chinese concerns, even though the political authority governing China has changed dramatically and multiple times over the past two hundred years or more.
Third, what China wants is limited, even though its power has rapidly expanded over the past generation. China's claims and goals are either being resolved or remain static. This reality is in contrast to many of the expectations of U.S. policymakers and to the conventional wisdom of the international relations scholarly literature, which maintains that states' interests will grow as power grows. Rather, the evidence shows that the Chinese leadership is concerned about internal challenges more than external threats or expansion.
We find that China does not pose the type of military threat that the conventional wisdom claims it does. Consequently, there is no need for a hostile military posture in the Pacific, and indeed the United States may be unnecessarily creating tensions. Just as important, we suggest that there is room for the two countries to cooperate on a number of issues areas that are currently overlooked. Finally, the conventional view of China de-emphasizes the economic and diplomatic arenas that a war-fighting approach is unsuited to address. The conventional wisdom about U.S. grand strategy is problematic, and the vision of China that exists in Washington is dangerously wrong.
This article proceeds as follows. First, we discuss the conventional wisdom regarding China's goals as represented by top policymakers in the United States and in the existing scholarly literature. The second section examines Chinese rhetoric and points out nuances in how to read and interpret Chinese rhetoric. The third section uses quantitative methods to more systematically and accurately assess Chinese claims across time as reflected in the most authoritative Chinese pronouncements. The fourth section details how China's main priorities are enduring and trans-dynastic, and the fifth section shows how the most important of these claims are not expanding, even though China's power has grown rapidly over the past generation. We present the implications of our argument for the U.S.-China relationship in the conclusion.
by David C. Kang, Jackie S. H. Wong, Zenobia T. Chan, MIT Press | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. The Roman empire collapsed because it was overextended. China won't make that mistake. They'll just get stronger and more self-reliant - securing their borders, advancing technology, providing security for their citizens. Dominant because they have a strategy for advancing their country's long-term interests, not dominance for its own sake. Most US problems have been self-inflicted - militarily, economically, politically, techologically. We've been distracted and screwing around for decades, empire building and trying to rule the world.]
On the Death of Tech Idealism (and Rise of the Homeless) in Northern California
One can imagine a young Steve Jobs digging the communalism of today’s Bay Area camps, whose countercultural idealism shares many threads with that of the Valley’s early hippie-nerds—ironic given the bulldozing of camps in the shadows of contemporary tech campuses and their tightly conformist corporate cultures. The commonalities don’t stretch very far: A rather thick thread in the hippie-techie braid is individualism, a whole lot of which hid behind the Me generation’s “New Communalist” movement. The marriage of these Bay Area cultures is alive and well, but today has more of a New Age–Burning Man vibe. (...)
Unhoused communities don’t randomly burble up from the sidewalk. They are born of the housed communities around them, which in the Valley’s case is a particularly curious one. The Valley’s valley is wide and smoggy enough that some days you can’t see the mountain ranges that form it. The scorching Diablo Range, where cattle roam oceans of desiccated grass, lies to the east.
On the other side, the lusher Santa Cruz Mountains, a place of dank redwood forests, organic farming communes, and uppity vineyards, form a verdant curtain between the Valley and the ocean. Here the tech elite build their villas and take to the fog-kissed ravines for athleisure-clad recreation.
The valley started to become the Valley in 1943 when IBM opened a factory to manufacture punch cards in San José. At the time, orchards carpeted much of the region. When the trees blossomed in early spring, the honey-scented flowers intoxicated bees and lovers alike. During the late summer harvest, the air was a punch bowl. Maps referred to it then as the Santa Clara Valley, but romantic minds of the day christened it the Valley of Heart’s Delight, after a 1927 poem by a local writer with Wordsworthian sensibilities, named Clara Louise Lawrence.
But Apple bought the road from the city—$23,814,257 for a half mile—so you can’t drive through there anymore. Between the steel bars of the fence you can still catch a glimpse of the Glendennings’ old fruit-drying barn, which has been renovated and is now storage for landscaping equipment. The new orchards and the old barn help soften the Pentagon vibe with a little farm-to-table ambience.
The Valley’s valley is not a stereotypical one because it lacks a mighty river meandering between the mountain ranges. Instead, there is the southern leg of San Francisco Bay, a shallow, brackish estuary fed by measly creeks that barely run in the dry season. It’s a bird and crustacean paradise, but the lack of fresh water and ocean currents make for a putrid aroma that’s further intensified by the landfills, wastewater treatment plants, and commercial salt-harvesting operations clustered around the waterfront.
The smell is so intense that it’s spawned a South Bay Odor Stakeholders Group “dedicated to identifying and resolving odor issues.” One finds Reddit threads with titles like South Bay Fucking Smell: “south bay people, you know what i mean. where the fuck is this rancid ass smell coming from. it’s pretty common for it to smell like shit here, i’ve smelled it my whole life, but i just want to know where it’s comin from. My guess is the shitty salty shallow south bay water spewing out smelly air, but idk.”
“That, or else it’s your mom,” replied another user, who referred to the odor as “the ass cloud.” The poetics of the region have shifted since Lawrence’s day.
The ass cloud did not dissuade the early tech settlers, who followed the money flowing from the patron saint of the Valley’s venture capitalists: DARPA, the Department of Defense’s secretive research agency, which commissioned much of the basic science from which the IT revolution sprang. While farms like the Glendennings’ continued to pump out prunes on the arable land between the Bay and the mountains, the military-industrial complex set up along the mud flats. The Navy built an eight-acre dirigible hangar in Mountain View, still one of the largest freestanding structures ever erected. The CIA quietly rooted itself among the reeds and spread rhizomatically. During the Cold War, aerospace companies blossomed between DOD installations. Lockheed was the Valley’s biggest employer when Kent and Steve Jobs were growing up in the suburbs that slowly consumed the orchards.
The American tech industry was born in the Bay Area because its defense industry parents came here to ward off the Japanese—during World War II, this was the gateway to the “Pacific Theater,” as the Asian front of the war was euphemistically referred to. This first generation of the Valley “seeded companies that repurposed technologies built for war to everyday life,” writes Margaret O’Mara, a tech industry historian. “Today’s tech giants all contain some defense-industry DNA.”
Jeff Bezos’s grandfather, for instance, was a high-ranking official at the US Atomic Energy Commission and at ARPA, the precursor to DARPA. Jerry Wozniak, father of Apple’s other Steve—Steve “The Woz” Wozniak, the company cofounder and part of the gang tweaking on computers in the Jobs’ garage—was an engineer at Lockheed. The military forefathers of the Valley must have been horrified at the hippies their children became, though by the eighties the arc of flower power had bent toward the common ground of Wall Street.
The Navy’s dirigible hangar still looms over the Bay, but Google now rents the property from the government for the parking of private jets. The company dominates the neighborhood to the west of the hangar, a spread of dull office buildings revolving around the central Googleplex, with its employee swimming pools, volleyball courts, and eighteen cafeterias. There are no houses or apartments in the neighborhood, though there are residential districts—of a sort. These are surprisingly affordable, which means that some of the folks who smear avocado on the techies’ toast and stock the kombucha taps have the good fortune to live nearby.
It’s easy to miss their humble abodes, however. An out-of-towner who gets off at the Google exit to take a leak could be forgiven for thinking they’d stumbled across some sort of RV convention. But those aren’t recreational vehicles lining the backstreets of the Google-burbs—those are homes on wheels.
RVs parked on the side of the road are the new desirable real estate, and like the old industrial cores of American cities that have evolved from roughshod hangouts for unemployed artists to haute loft developments for upwardly mobile professionals, their inhabitants aren’t immune to class stratification. Most of the rigs are older, ramshackle models, but here and there shiny coaches broadcast the relative wealth of their inhabitants—techies who could afford an apartment but don’t want to waste their money on rent.
They roll out of bed, hop on a company bike, and are at the office in three minutes, in the meantime saving up for a big house in the outer, outer, outer burbs, where you can still get a McMansion for under $3 million. Some already have the McMansion and use their RV as a workweek crash pad.
The more-rickety RVs belong to the avocado smearers and lawn mower operators. Crisanto Avenue, five minutes from the Googleplex, is the Latin America of Mountain View’s homes-on-wheels community. It’s like a museum of 1980s RVs—Toyota Escapers, Winnebago Braves, Chevy Lindys, Fleetwood Jamborees—most of them emanating Spanish banter, many with blue tarps over the roof, and some leaking unmentionable juices from onboard septic tanks. Apartments line one side of Crisanto, but the side with the RVs fronts onto train tracks. A shaded strip of earth along the tracks, maybe twelve feet wide, serves as a communal front yard, complete with potted plants and patio furniture, for pets and kids to play.
An older Peruvian woman named Ida invited me into her RV, where a half-eaten pineapple sat serenely on an otherwise empty table. She used to live in a two-bedroom apartment with sixteen other people—“Fue imposible!” she said—until she learned of the RV scene. She couldn’t afford to purchase one, but there’s a growing industry in the Valley for old-school RV rentals; residents on Crisanto told me they pay between $500 and $1,000 per month, depending on the RV, plus a $75 fee to pump sewage.
Since Ida arrived in the US in 2003, she has worked mainly as a nanny, often for around six dollars per hour. Work was sparse during the pandemic, so she accepted whatever pay she was offered. One family gave her twenty dollars for taking care of their two children for twelve hours. She’d held America in high esteem before living here. “La vida en los Estados Unidos es terrible,” she said.
My visual experience of the Valley began to shift. My eyes had once flashed at views of the water, clever billboards (“Hey Facebook, our planet doesn’t like your climate posts”), and homes with the billowy, buff-colored grasses and scrawny wildflowers that signify the aesthetics of people who can afford expensive landscaping designed to look feral.
But the more time I spent with the Valley’s have-nots, the more my focus became trained on the visual language of the income inequality ecosystem: the camouflage patterns of desiccated vegetation pocked with blue tarps and plastic bags flapping in the branches; the hulking silhouettes of recreational vehicles parked in non-recreational environments; the bodies splayed out on the sidewalk. (...)
“Vanlife has become the norm here,” a veteran gig worker named Chase, who’s driven for Uber, Instacart, and Amazon Flex, told me. He was not talking about hipsters who move into a home on wheels because it sounds like a fun and Instagrammable lifestyle. He was referring to his colleagues who have no other choice.
On the other side, the lusher Santa Cruz Mountains, a place of dank redwood forests, organic farming communes, and uppity vineyards, form a verdant curtain between the Valley and the ocean. Here the tech elite build their villas and take to the fog-kissed ravines for athleisure-clad recreation.
The valley started to become the Valley in 1943 when IBM opened a factory to manufacture punch cards in San José. At the time, orchards carpeted much of the region. When the trees blossomed in early spring, the honey-scented flowers intoxicated bees and lovers alike. During the late summer harvest, the air was a punch bowl. Maps referred to it then as the Santa Clara Valley, but romantic minds of the day christened it the Valley of Heart’s Delight, after a 1927 poem by a local writer with Wordsworthian sensibilities, named Clara Louise Lawrence.
No brush can paint the pictureCupertino did not exist back then. The Glendenning family farmed the land where the Apple Spaceship now sits. Prunes were their specialty. The farm was on Pruneridge Avenue—the valley was considered the prune capital of the world, supplying 30 percent of the global market—which passed through their orchards near the present location of Steve Jobs Theater, a smaller circular building next to the mothership.
No pen describe the sight
That one can find in April
In “The Valley of Heart’s Delight.”
But Apple bought the road from the city—$23,814,257 for a half mile—so you can’t drive through there anymore. Between the steel bars of the fence you can still catch a glimpse of the Glendennings’ old fruit-drying barn, which has been renovated and is now storage for landscaping equipment. The new orchards and the old barn help soften the Pentagon vibe with a little farm-to-table ambience.
The Valley’s valley is not a stereotypical one because it lacks a mighty river meandering between the mountain ranges. Instead, there is the southern leg of San Francisco Bay, a shallow, brackish estuary fed by measly creeks that barely run in the dry season. It’s a bird and crustacean paradise, but the lack of fresh water and ocean currents make for a putrid aroma that’s further intensified by the landfills, wastewater treatment plants, and commercial salt-harvesting operations clustered around the waterfront.
The smell is so intense that it’s spawned a South Bay Odor Stakeholders Group “dedicated to identifying and resolving odor issues.” One finds Reddit threads with titles like South Bay Fucking Smell: “south bay people, you know what i mean. where the fuck is this rancid ass smell coming from. it’s pretty common for it to smell like shit here, i’ve smelled it my whole life, but i just want to know where it’s comin from. My guess is the shitty salty shallow south bay water spewing out smelly air, but idk.”
“That, or else it’s your mom,” replied another user, who referred to the odor as “the ass cloud.” The poetics of the region have shifted since Lawrence’s day.
The ass cloud did not dissuade the early tech settlers, who followed the money flowing from the patron saint of the Valley’s venture capitalists: DARPA, the Department of Defense’s secretive research agency, which commissioned much of the basic science from which the IT revolution sprang. While farms like the Glendennings’ continued to pump out prunes on the arable land between the Bay and the mountains, the military-industrial complex set up along the mud flats. The Navy built an eight-acre dirigible hangar in Mountain View, still one of the largest freestanding structures ever erected. The CIA quietly rooted itself among the reeds and spread rhizomatically. During the Cold War, aerospace companies blossomed between DOD installations. Lockheed was the Valley’s biggest employer when Kent and Steve Jobs were growing up in the suburbs that slowly consumed the orchards.
The American tech industry was born in the Bay Area because its defense industry parents came here to ward off the Japanese—during World War II, this was the gateway to the “Pacific Theater,” as the Asian front of the war was euphemistically referred to. This first generation of the Valley “seeded companies that repurposed technologies built for war to everyday life,” writes Margaret O’Mara, a tech industry historian. “Today’s tech giants all contain some defense-industry DNA.”
Jeff Bezos’s grandfather, for instance, was a high-ranking official at the US Atomic Energy Commission and at ARPA, the precursor to DARPA. Jerry Wozniak, father of Apple’s other Steve—Steve “The Woz” Wozniak, the company cofounder and part of the gang tweaking on computers in the Jobs’ garage—was an engineer at Lockheed. The military forefathers of the Valley must have been horrified at the hippies their children became, though by the eighties the arc of flower power had bent toward the common ground of Wall Street.
The Navy’s dirigible hangar still looms over the Bay, but Google now rents the property from the government for the parking of private jets. The company dominates the neighborhood to the west of the hangar, a spread of dull office buildings revolving around the central Googleplex, with its employee swimming pools, volleyball courts, and eighteen cafeterias. There are no houses or apartments in the neighborhood, though there are residential districts—of a sort. These are surprisingly affordable, which means that some of the folks who smear avocado on the techies’ toast and stock the kombucha taps have the good fortune to live nearby.
It’s easy to miss their humble abodes, however. An out-of-towner who gets off at the Google exit to take a leak could be forgiven for thinking they’d stumbled across some sort of RV convention. But those aren’t recreational vehicles lining the backstreets of the Google-burbs—those are homes on wheels.
RVs parked on the side of the road are the new desirable real estate, and like the old industrial cores of American cities that have evolved from roughshod hangouts for unemployed artists to haute loft developments for upwardly mobile professionals, their inhabitants aren’t immune to class stratification. Most of the rigs are older, ramshackle models, but here and there shiny coaches broadcast the relative wealth of their inhabitants—techies who could afford an apartment but don’t want to waste their money on rent.
They roll out of bed, hop on a company bike, and are at the office in three minutes, in the meantime saving up for a big house in the outer, outer, outer burbs, where you can still get a McMansion for under $3 million. Some already have the McMansion and use their RV as a workweek crash pad.
The more-rickety RVs belong to the avocado smearers and lawn mower operators. Crisanto Avenue, five minutes from the Googleplex, is the Latin America of Mountain View’s homes-on-wheels community. It’s like a museum of 1980s RVs—Toyota Escapers, Winnebago Braves, Chevy Lindys, Fleetwood Jamborees—most of them emanating Spanish banter, many with blue tarps over the roof, and some leaking unmentionable juices from onboard septic tanks. Apartments line one side of Crisanto, but the side with the RVs fronts onto train tracks. A shaded strip of earth along the tracks, maybe twelve feet wide, serves as a communal front yard, complete with potted plants and patio furniture, for pets and kids to play.
An older Peruvian woman named Ida invited me into her RV, where a half-eaten pineapple sat serenely on an otherwise empty table. She used to live in a two-bedroom apartment with sixteen other people—“Fue imposible!” she said—until she learned of the RV scene. She couldn’t afford to purchase one, but there’s a growing industry in the Valley for old-school RV rentals; residents on Crisanto told me they pay between $500 and $1,000 per month, depending on the RV, plus a $75 fee to pump sewage.
Since Ida arrived in the US in 2003, she has worked mainly as a nanny, often for around six dollars per hour. Work was sparse during the pandemic, so she accepted whatever pay she was offered. One family gave her twenty dollars for taking care of their two children for twelve hours. She’d held America in high esteem before living here. “La vida en los Estados Unidos es terrible,” she said.
My visual experience of the Valley began to shift. My eyes had once flashed at views of the water, clever billboards (“Hey Facebook, our planet doesn’t like your climate posts”), and homes with the billowy, buff-colored grasses and scrawny wildflowers that signify the aesthetics of people who can afford expensive landscaping designed to look feral.
But the more time I spent with the Valley’s have-nots, the more my focus became trained on the visual language of the income inequality ecosystem: the camouflage patterns of desiccated vegetation pocked with blue tarps and plastic bags flapping in the branches; the hulking silhouettes of recreational vehicles parked in non-recreational environments; the bodies splayed out on the sidewalk. (...)
“Vanlife has become the norm here,” a veteran gig worker named Chase, who’s driven for Uber, Instacart, and Amazon Flex, told me. He was not talking about hipsters who move into a home on wheels because it sounds like a fun and Instagrammable lifestyle. He was referring to his colleagues who have no other choice.
Wednesday, November 19, 2025
Ronald Reagan and the First MAGA Movement
“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” — Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
“Let’s Make America Great Again” — Ronald Reagan campaign slogan, 1980
His policies are a different story. They were unpopular then. They’re unpopular now. Americans didn’t want to see an upward redistribution of wealth, the bloating of the military budget, tax cuts for the rich, and the arming of Central American death squads. Reagan’s secret funding of the Nicaraguan Contras, in direct violation of U.S. law, proved staggeringly unpopular, with nearly 80 percent of the public disapproving. Yet even after the exposure of the Iran-Contra scandal, threefourths of Americans still approved of Reagan “as a person.” It’s not hard to see why. Reagan’s public persona was avuncular and self-deprecating. He was a Hollywood actor, and he performed the role of president perfectly. He peppered his speech with humorous, folksy anecdotes and spoke in a warm, reassuring voice. He conveyed an impression of complete innocence, so that when repeated ethical scandals hit his administration, he was able to convince much of the public that he couldn’t possibly be responsible for anything nefarious—hence the moniker “Teflon president.” Watch clips of Reagan joshing with the press, or making light-hearted references to his assassination attempt, and we can see easily how the Reagan mystique was developed.
But to treat Reagan as a vapid actor, a pleasant frontman for a rapacious oligarchy, is to underappreciate his talent and let him off the hook for his worst actions. Watch Reagan interacting with the press in 1987, and it’s clear that he’s fully lucid and engaged. After the Iran-Contra scandal, Congressional leaders declined to impeach Reagan that same year, perhaps because he successfully conveyed the impression that he was a bewildered innocent. (Famously, he confessed: “I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”) But he deserves to be given credit for his record.
In 2011, a Gallup poll found that when Americans were asked who the greatest president in U.S. history was, they were most likely to say Ronald Reagan. Abraham Lincoln and Bill Clinton were next on the list. George Washington came in fifth, after JFK. Reagan is less fondly remembered among certain groups, like Black Americans and LGBTQ people, who recall what his presidency meant for them. But on the whole, Americans had, and still have, a positive impression of Reagan the man.
Yet the actual record of the Reagan administration is horrendous. As Peter Dreier wrote in the Nation in 2011,
During his two terms in the White House (1981–89), Reagan presided over a widening gap between the rich and everyone else, declining wages and living standards for working families, an assault on labor unions as a vehicle to lift Americans into the middle class, a dramatic increase in poverty and homelessness, and the consolidation and deregulation of the financial industry that led to the current mortgage meltdown, foreclosure epidemic and lingering recession. These trends were not caused by inevitable social and economic forces. They resulted from Reagan’s policy and political choices based on an underlying “you’re on your own” ideology.
Beneath Reagan’s “gee whiz” and “aw shucks” persona there was a cruelty, a belief that people were responsible for their own suffering and it wasn’t the job of government to help alleviate social misery. Reagan famously said that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” This would be news to anyone who has ever been rescued by a firefighter or a park ranger or given a Social Security check. But Reagan didn’t try to make a factual, logical case that the government was incapable of doing anything but harm. Instead, he told stories that projected a vision of an idyllic small-town America where people bootstrapped their way to success. Beneath the stories, his actions were cruel and deadly. Reagan helped create many of the most devastating problems facing American society in 2024.
Reagan always denied being in any way racist and claimed to have had a “hatred for bigotry and prejudice” from an early age. Nevertheless, in a private phone call with Richard Nixon, he called African United Nations delegates “monkeys,” and rightwing economist Thomas Sowell departed Reagan’s 1980 campaign after he insisted on giving a “states’ rights” speech in Mississippi near the site of the infamous 1964 murders of three civil rights workers, a move that was widely interpreted (including by Sowell) as a dog-whistle to white supremacists. Reagan’s support for apartheid South Africa (and softness on white supremacist Rhodesia), his reluctance to approve a federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr., and his initiation of the “war on drugs” all help to explain why Black Americans did not look back fondly at Reagan’s presidency once it was over.
Reagan never cared much if what he was saying was true. He would pass movie scenes off as historical fact and even told the prime minister of Israel that he had personally helped liberate Nazi death camps, when in fact he had edited footage of them in Culver City, California, while working on films for the War Department. As Jimmy Carter said, with characteristic understatement, “President Reagan doesn’t always check the facts before he makes statements, and the press accepts this as kind of amusing.” In On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency, journalist Mark Hertsgaard reports that eventually, the press just gave up on fact-checking Reagan, since so much of what he said was nonsense. The national news editor of Newsweek said that “I think everybody in the press corps is just a little bit astonished at how many times the President can make horrible mistakes in public[…] [F]or a long time we were writing practically every week a little box on what he said that wasn’t true. We ultimately just couldn’t stand doing it week after week after week because it seemed sort of unfair […] [I]t seemed like persecuting him or something.”
Much of what Reagan said was ludicrous. In the words of his daughter Patti Davis, “he [had] the ability to make statements that are so far outside the parameters of logic that they leave you speechless.” (...)
Simon Hoggart noted in The Observer in 1986 the peculiar way in which Reagan’s “errors glide past unchallenged. At one point […] he alleged that almost half the population gets a free meal from the government each day. No one told him he was crazy. The general message of the American press is that, yes, while it is perfectly true that the emperor has no clothes, nudity is actually very acceptable this year.” Mark Green notes that Reagan’s rigid anti-government ideology, his belief that the state could do no right, led him to wilfully misinterpret reality: “This loathing for government, this eagerness to prove that any program to aid the disadvantaged is nothing but a boondoggle and a money gobbler, leads him to contrive statistics and stories with unmatched vigor.” Those who interacted with Reagan up close were often shocked by his ignorance. “You sometimes wonder why it occurred to anyone that he should be president, or even governor,” commented Henry Kissinger. Richard Nixon called him a “man of limited mental capacity [who] simply doesn’t know what the Christ is going on in the foreign area.” House Speaker Tip O’Neill said that Reagan “knows less about the budget than any president in my lifetime. He can’t even carry on a conversation about the budget. It’s an absolute and utter disgrace.” Reagan was a hands-off and inattentive manager, nodding off in meetings or remaining silent and often leaving staff in the dark about what his administration’s actual policies were supposed to be. Many people have described Reagan as a mere figurehead or speculated that his Alzheimer’s symptoms began before his term in office was over.
But to treat Reagan as a vapid actor, a pleasant frontman for a rapacious oligarchy, is to underappreciate his talent and let him off the hook for his worst actions. Watch Reagan interacting with the press in 1987, and it’s clear that he’s fully lucid and engaged. After the Iran-Contra scandal, Congressional leaders declined to impeach Reagan that same year, perhaps because he successfully conveyed the impression that he was a bewildered innocent. (Famously, he confessed: “I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”) But he deserves to be given credit for his record.
The record was disgraceful. It’s chilling to go back and look at how Reagan’s press secretary responded to questions about AIDS, for instance. As a terrifying epidemic began to decimate the gay community, Reagan’s spokesman cracked homophobic jokes in the press room. The reporter who asked about AIDS was “met with dismissive wisecracks questioning the reporter’s own sexual orientation.” Reagan himself showed no interest in the issue and even proposed to cut funding for AIDS research, until the death of his friend Rock Hudson spurred him to action.
Despite being the only former labor leader ever to ascend to the presidency (he had been president of the Screen Actors Guild), Reagan did everything in his power to crush the American labor movement. In 1981, 10,000 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) went on strike for better pay and working conditions. Reagan simply fired them all. As Richard Sharpe writes,
The strikers were often working-class men and women who had achieved suburban middle class lives as air traffic controllers without having gone to college. Many were veterans of the US armed forces where they had learned their skills; their union had backed Reagan in his election campaign. Nevertheless, Reagan refused to back down. Several strikers were jailed; the union was fined and eventually made bankrupt. Only about 800 got their jobs back when Clinton lifted the ban on rehiring those who went on strike. Many of the strikers were forced into poverty as a result of being blacklisted for [U.S. government] employment.
Reagan’s crushing of the union “was interpreted by many as a green light from the federal government for union-busting, and ushered in the vicious employer attacks of the 1980s.” The head of Reagan’s Office of Personnel Management said this explicitly, writing that with the strike, “American business leaders were given a lesson in managerial leadership that they could not and did not ignore. Many private sector executives have told me that they were able to cut the fat from their organizations and adopt more competitive work practices because of what the government did in those days.” Journalist Jon Schwarz dates the beginning of the 40-year-long “murder of the middle class” to Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers. [ed. I do too.]
Reagan began what journalist Mark Ames calls “one of the most shocking wealth transfers in the history of the world, all under the propaganda diversion of ‘making America competitive’ and ‘unleashing the creative energies of the American worker.’” With the aid of Congressional Democrats, he substantially cut taxes on the wealthy and attempted to undo both the New Deal and the Great Society. This included making more than $22 billion in cuts to social welfare programs, while still massively increasing the federal deficit, in part by bloating the military budget. Poverty, homelessness, and precarity all increased.
It’s harder to measure the indirect cultural consequences of Reagan’s tenure, but he certainly did nothing to counteract the “greed is good” spirit of the times. As Mario Cuomo put it, Reagan “made the denial of compassion for the people who needed it most sound like a virtue.” Similarly, Cornel West says that “Reagan made it fashionable to be indifferent to the poor and gave permission to be greedy with little or no conscience.”
In The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America, William Kleinknecht summarizes the dire consequences of “Reaganomics”:
He enacted policies that helped wipe out the high-paying jobs for the working class that were the real backbone of the country. This supposed guardian of traditional values was the architect of wrenching social change that swept across the country in the 1980s, the emergence of an eerie, overcommercialized, postmodern America that has left so much of the populace psychically adrift. Reagan propelled the transition to hypercapitalism, an epoch in which the forces of self-interest and profit seek to make a final rout of traditional human values. His legacy—mergers, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy, privatization, globalization—helped weaken the family and eradicate small-town life and the sense of community.
Investigative journalist Greg Palast puts things even more bluntly:
The New York Times, in its canned obit, wrote that Reagan projected, “faith in small town America” and “old-time values.” “Values” my ass. It was union-busting and a declaration of war on the poor and anyone who couldn’t buy designer dresses. It was the New Meanness, bringing starvation back to America so that every millionaire could get another million. “Small town” values? From the movie star of the Pacific Palisades, the Malibu mogul? I want to throw up.
All of that’s just on the domestic front. Reagan’s foreign policy was a horror show. His administration supported Saddam Hussein as Iraq waged a brutal war of aggression against Iran, even covering up evidence of Hussein’s use of chemical weapons. Reagan violated both domestic and international law in his support for the Nicaraguan Contras. The Contras, according to Human Rights Watch, “were major and systematic violators of the most basic standards of the laws of armed conflict, including by launching indiscriminate attacks on civilians, selectively murdering non-combatants, and mistreating prisoners.” (Reagan repeatedly compared the Contras to the American Founding Fathers, labeling them “freedom fighters” and “our brothers.”) The Reagan administration funneled money to them through arms sales in explicit violation of U.S. law, while Reagan’s terrorism against Nicaragua (mining the country’s harbors and destroying civilian boats) was found to be illegal by the World Court, a ruling the administration simply ignored.
Like other presidents, Reagan supported friendly despots around the world when it served “U.S. interests,” including not only Hussein, but Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, the deposed Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, Suharto in Indonesia, and the genocidal Guatemalan military leader Ríos Montt, whom he called “a man of great personal integrity and commitment.” Reagan freely violated international law, such as by invading Grenada without any authorization from the United Nations Security Council. Yet some Reagan policies look moderate and restrained by comparison with recent presidential actions. Reagan was willing to restrain Israel when its conduct became embarrassing and appears to have been sincerely committed to the issue of reducing nuclear weapons, going so far as to propose eliminating nuclear weapons altogether in one meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Unfortunately, Reagan was rigidly committed to his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, derisively known as “Star Wars”), an attempt to intercept inbound nuclear attacks on the United States. Reagan thought nothing could be objectionable about defending against a nuclear attack, but it disrupted the logic of deterrence (if the U.S. could defend itself from a nuclear attack but the Soviet Union could not, there was less reason for the U.S. to avoid attacking the Soviet Union), and the Soviets saw it as a serious threat, which led to one of the worst nuclear scares of the Cold War.
The Reagan presidency was a giant fraud. He promised safety but brought us closer to Armageddon. He promised prosperity but crushed American workers. His kindly demeanor belied a nasty streak. (For instance, Jon Schwarz writes in the Intercept that “when Patty Hearst’s kidnappers demanded that her family start handing out free food to the poor, Reagan privately said, ‘It’s too bad we can’t have an epidemic of botulism.’”) TIME magazine called him “a Prospero of American memories, a magician who carries a bright, ideal America like a holograph in his mind and projects the image in the air.” Reagan, “master illusionist, is himself a kind of American dream.” Well, as George Carlin said, “they call it the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.” Reagan smiled at the country in a big cowboy hat while robbing people blind.
From Ronald to Donald
An ignorant, deceitful entertainer bamboozling Americans into thinking that plutocracy is good for them. Does this sound familiar? We’ve had another one of those recently, one even more cartoonishly dishonest in his promises to “Make America Great Again” (a slogan Trump simply lifted and repurposed from Reagan). As Schwarz writes, Trump and Reagan share the “same political DNA”: “Reagan was Trump’s progenitor, and Trump is Reagan’s degenerate 21st-century descendant. Trump is to Reagan much like crack is to cocaine: cheaper, faster-acting, and less glamorous. Still, in their essence, they are the same thing.”
There are some important differences. Reagan exuded positivity, even utopianism, promising that “America’s best days are yet to come. Our proudest moments are yet to be. Our most glorious achievements are just ahead.” He was capable of seeming reassuring and reasonable, as in his well-received address after the Challenger space shuttle disaster. Trump’s tone is dark, hateful, vindictive, while Reagan’s was sunny. But both carried out variations on a similar fraud.
Reagan promised to tame the worst excesses of government. But in office, he let corruption and abuse run rampant. His Department of Housing and Urban Development was “enveloped by influence peddling, favoritism, abuse, greed, fraud, embezzlement, and theft” according to the House Government Operations Committee. His presidency ultimately resulted “in the investigation, indictment or conviction of over 138 administration officials, the largest number for any president of the United States.” Reagan should plainly have been impeached and removed from office over the Iran-Contra scandal. The irony is that we only need to have a Reaganesque fear of government when people like Ronald Reagan are running the government.
Let’s Make America Great Again, Reagan said. Did he? Of course not. It was a fantasy, an image. Trump is the same, offering an appealing lie that desperate people would very much like to believe in. But if it’s trivial to point out that these men are selling snake oil, the question is: how do you convince people not to buy it? That’s much more difficult. Reagan won two landslide victories... Perhaps one lesson of Reagan is that because appealing visions and stories can be so powerful, we need one of our own. People voted for Reagan even though they disliked his policies, because he seemed personable and he projected an image of forward-looking confidence. Trump does not seem kind or personable, but he has a powerful story to tell, one of a country being ruined and awaiting its redeemer. Counteracting salesmen like these requires a powerful alternative story, with a promise of a different, better future. Democrats since Barack Obama (who himself was an admirer of Reagan) have failed to offer such a message—consider Hillary Clinton’s “America is Already Great” or Joe Biden’s promise to his donors that “nothing will fundamentally change.”
Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump are two of the greatest con men of the age, successfully convincing many people to do immense harm to themselves and their country. Their political talents, however, should not be underrated. Reagan has, incredibly, been successfully sold as one of the greatest presidents ever, with Republicans viewing him as something close to a saint, an achievement that Noam Chomsky says would have impressed Kim Il-Sung. We need not just to puncture the myths, which is done well in both Kleinknecht’s The Man Who Sold The World and Will Bunch’s Tear Down This Myth, but to offer a more inspiring alternative that will keep people from falling for the pitches of vicious grifters.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Good summary. I lived through it all, and in fact had to deal with a few of Reagan's policies directly (like leasing the entire coastline of the US to oil and gas development in an acceleratated 5-year OCS leasing schedule). But it wasn't just Reagan. Equal blame (if not more so) should fall on other ideologues at the time including Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist ('drown government in the bathtub' fame); Alan Greenspan, and the numerous cabinet secretaries and others that faithfully, if not gleefully, set forth to carry out Reagan's agenda (like Interior Secretary James Watt, and EPA's Anne Gorsuch, mom of present Supreme Court justice Neal Gorsuch). Never could have imagined it could get much worse (ha!), but then we ended up taking a few detours into Afghanistan, Iraq, legalized torture, and black sites. Connect the dots. Reagan lit the fire that hollowed out the middle class, deregulated government, crippled unions, jump started neoliberalism (later supercharged by Clinton), and set us on the path to where we are now. At this point, with a completely useless Congress, weaponized military and Justice Department, open corruption, unapologetic criminal pardons, and DOGE-depleted government things can't possibly get much worse, right? Right? (ha!)]
Gerrymandering Looks Like a Worse and Worse Bet for GOP
It is certainly still too soon to say what the effects of a spasm of mid-decade gerrymandering will be on the results of the 2026 midterms, but one thing we can say for sure already: It won’t have been worth it.
After three furious months that began when Texas’s August gerrymander kicked off a national game of tit for tat, there are only 35 or 40 House seats that we can already expect to be at least somewhat competitive next year. About half of those are guaranteed battlegrounds — the perennial swing districts. But of the larger swing set, it’s Republicans who have slightly more exposure.
A light breeze would probably be enough to deliver the three red-to-blue flips necessary to see a fifth change in partisan control of the House this century. You’d have to go back to the 1870s and 1880s to find another equivalent period of partisan turmoil.
Another change in power would be no surprise for a House in which neither party has been able to find anything like a stable majority. But what we learned from the elections at the start of this month was that there are another 15 or more seats, all currently held by Republicans, that now have to be considered in play next November.
Certainly, the winds could still change direction. Given that less than 10 percent of House districts are competitive in a pure sense, a run of good news for the party in power could still limit Democrats to very modest gains. Maybe not fewer than three seats, but perhaps not enough to have anything other than a very weak majority.
That’s the scenario Republicans had in mind when they undertook their Texas maneuver. In 2022, the GOP learned the hard way that there are limits to the potency of the midterm curse that has afflicted the majority party in almost every midterm election for more than a century.
Four years ago at this time, the consensus view held that the deepening unpopularity of then-President Biden and the results of the off-year elections in New Jersey and Virginia foreshadowed Democratic losses somewhere in the range of two dozen seats. With Republicans only needing to flip three seats, control of the House wasn’t ever really seriously in doubt. What the GOP was instead thinking about was how to get at the upper end of the range of possible flips and give future Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) a little cushion once the red team took control.
Instead, Republicans won only nine seats, which, as we know, gave the new leaders no room to maneuver. The future Speaker was a former Speaker in just nine months. The Republican underperformance of 2022 had created a narrow majority in which small factions, and even individual members, had veto power over the agenda.
Things got weirder still in 2024, when a Republican presidential candidate won the national popular vote for only the second time in 30 years, but House Republicans still managed a net loss of two seats. First, the midterm wave didn’t materialize, and then a decisive win for their party in a presidential contest produced no downballot benefits for them.
That’s all been very frustrating for House Republicans, many of whom still remember the golden days of the 2010s when the GOP controlled more than 240 seats. If you’ve served in a House majority where you could afford to lose nearly 30 members of your own party and still advance legislation, this has to be a real grind.
But there was an upside. As House Republicans came to terms with their even smaller majority after 2024, the silver lining seemed to be that perhaps the era of “wave” elections was over. Democrats lost a bunch of House seats when Biden won by more than 7 million votes in 2020, the Republicans had failed to capitalize in 2022, and Trump 2.0 had no coattails.
There’s a strong argument there for the idea that the boom-and-bust cycle that had delivered wild swings in both directions from 2006 to 2018 had come to a close. It could be explained by the ways in which technology has made gerrymandering more effective or by the self-gerrymandering of the electorate. American voters have become extraordinarily — dangerously, even — sorted into compact partisan clusters. This geographic siloing fits with the death of “all politics is local” in favor of a highly nationalized approach to elections. Plus, districts are huge now, with nearly 900,000 constituents for every House member.
Big districts with tight partisan clusters exploited by big data, and a climate of zombie party loyalty could explain why in three consecutive elections we have had teeny-tiny majorities.
And if that is the way of the world, what Republicans did in Texas made sense. If the range of the cycle-to-cycle swing is less than 10 seats, five seats is a lot. It made even more sense if one accepted the conventional wisdom that Democrats didn’t have many options for retaliation. Democrats already mastered gerrymandering in places such as Illinois, where their state-level control was based on maximizing the clout of their voters in those big blue dots surrounded by red counties.
Plus, Democrats had been decrying gerrymandering for years. They put it at the center of their 2021 bill for a federal takeover of elections, and multiple blue states, including California, had passed measures requiring a nonpartisan drawing of lines.
Those assumptions turned out to be wrong. It’s still too soon to say, but right now, the best guess is that the coast-to-coast redistricting wars are probably worth just two or three seats for Republicans. If we assume the Republican premise that the potential swing before gerrymandering was just eight or nine seats, three seats isn’t nothing, but probably not worth the cost and the inevitable unintended consequences.
And if those unintended consequences include further motivating an already frothy Democratic base in a cycle that, for now anyway, looks like an old-fashioned wave, the Texas strategy will look like a debacle.
by Chris Stirewalt, The Hill | Read More:
Image: Texas Monthly/Getty via
After three furious months that began when Texas’s August gerrymander kicked off a national game of tit for tat, there are only 35 or 40 House seats that we can already expect to be at least somewhat competitive next year. About half of those are guaranteed battlegrounds — the perennial swing districts. But of the larger swing set, it’s Republicans who have slightly more exposure.
Another change in power would be no surprise for a House in which neither party has been able to find anything like a stable majority. But what we learned from the elections at the start of this month was that there are another 15 or more seats, all currently held by Republicans, that now have to be considered in play next November.
Certainly, the winds could still change direction. Given that less than 10 percent of House districts are competitive in a pure sense, a run of good news for the party in power could still limit Democrats to very modest gains. Maybe not fewer than three seats, but perhaps not enough to have anything other than a very weak majority.
That’s the scenario Republicans had in mind when they undertook their Texas maneuver. In 2022, the GOP learned the hard way that there are limits to the potency of the midterm curse that has afflicted the majority party in almost every midterm election for more than a century.
Four years ago at this time, the consensus view held that the deepening unpopularity of then-President Biden and the results of the off-year elections in New Jersey and Virginia foreshadowed Democratic losses somewhere in the range of two dozen seats. With Republicans only needing to flip three seats, control of the House wasn’t ever really seriously in doubt. What the GOP was instead thinking about was how to get at the upper end of the range of possible flips and give future Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) a little cushion once the red team took control.
Instead, Republicans won only nine seats, which, as we know, gave the new leaders no room to maneuver. The future Speaker was a former Speaker in just nine months. The Republican underperformance of 2022 had created a narrow majority in which small factions, and even individual members, had veto power over the agenda.
Things got weirder still in 2024, when a Republican presidential candidate won the national popular vote for only the second time in 30 years, but House Republicans still managed a net loss of two seats. First, the midterm wave didn’t materialize, and then a decisive win for their party in a presidential contest produced no downballot benefits for them.
That’s all been very frustrating for House Republicans, many of whom still remember the golden days of the 2010s when the GOP controlled more than 240 seats. If you’ve served in a House majority where you could afford to lose nearly 30 members of your own party and still advance legislation, this has to be a real grind.
But there was an upside. As House Republicans came to terms with their even smaller majority after 2024, the silver lining seemed to be that perhaps the era of “wave” elections was over. Democrats lost a bunch of House seats when Biden won by more than 7 million votes in 2020, the Republicans had failed to capitalize in 2022, and Trump 2.0 had no coattails.
There’s a strong argument there for the idea that the boom-and-bust cycle that had delivered wild swings in both directions from 2006 to 2018 had come to a close. It could be explained by the ways in which technology has made gerrymandering more effective or by the self-gerrymandering of the electorate. American voters have become extraordinarily — dangerously, even — sorted into compact partisan clusters. This geographic siloing fits with the death of “all politics is local” in favor of a highly nationalized approach to elections. Plus, districts are huge now, with nearly 900,000 constituents for every House member.
Big districts with tight partisan clusters exploited by big data, and a climate of zombie party loyalty could explain why in three consecutive elections we have had teeny-tiny majorities.
And if that is the way of the world, what Republicans did in Texas made sense. If the range of the cycle-to-cycle swing is less than 10 seats, five seats is a lot. It made even more sense if one accepted the conventional wisdom that Democrats didn’t have many options for retaliation. Democrats already mastered gerrymandering in places such as Illinois, where their state-level control was based on maximizing the clout of their voters in those big blue dots surrounded by red counties.
Plus, Democrats had been decrying gerrymandering for years. They put it at the center of their 2021 bill for a federal takeover of elections, and multiple blue states, including California, had passed measures requiring a nonpartisan drawing of lines.
Those assumptions turned out to be wrong. It’s still too soon to say, but right now, the best guess is that the coast-to-coast redistricting wars are probably worth just two or three seats for Republicans. If we assume the Republican premise that the potential swing before gerrymandering was just eight or nine seats, three seats isn’t nothing, but probably not worth the cost and the inevitable unintended consequences.
And if those unintended consequences include further motivating an already frothy Democratic base in a cycle that, for now anyway, looks like an old-fashioned wave, the Texas strategy will look like a debacle.
by Chris Stirewalt, The Hill | Read More:
Image: Texas Monthly/Getty via
Only a Failing System Could Produce Chuck Grassley
Did you know that, right now, the person who sits third in line to the U.S. presidency is a deeply strange 92-year-old from Iowa? It’s one of those facts you forget about, until you look at the government website for “presidential succession” and get taken by surprise. But there it is: if anything happens to Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Mike Johnson, Senator Chuck Grassley would be our country’s Commander in Chief. He’s both the President pro tempore of the Senate and the chair of its Judiciary Committee, which makes him one of the most powerful people in Congress. This is alarming news for America, because Grassley is also the oldest member of Congress—he’s been in politics since the Eisenhower administration—and one of its foremost weirdos. On a regular basis, he puts things on the internet that make Trump look normal by comparison. He has a legislative track record a mile long, and most of it is awful. But the problem he represents is much bigger than one man. The fact that someone like Chuck Grassley has represented Iowa in the Senate for 45 years is a sign that American democracy is in a near-terminal state of dysfunction. What’s more, it’s the most damning indictment of the Democratic Party imaginable. If they can’t beat this guy, what are they good for?
When Chuck Grassley was born in 1933, Hitler and Stalin were both still alive, and the chocolate chip cookie had not yet been invented. When he was first elected to the Iowa state legislature in 1958, segregation and Jim Crow were still in full effect, and would be for another six years. When he became a U.S. senator in 1980, it was part of the “Reagan Revolution” that created the Republican Party as we know it today—and Grassley was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, who reportedly gave him “an eight out of ten for his voting record.” One of his first big decisions in Washington was to vote against the creation of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983, although he insists he was just concerned about the expense of giving federal workers another day off. Simply put, this guy has been in Congress forever, outlasting six successive presidents. Now, at age 92, he visibly struggles to read statements on the Senate floor—but that hasn’t stopped him from filing the paperwork to run for yet another term in 2028, when he’d be 95. More likely, if the actuarial tables are anything to go by, he’ll follow in the footsteps of Senator Dianne Feinstein and Representative Gerry Connolly, and simply drop dead in office one of these days.
There’s a popular line of thinking, embodied in David Hogg’s “Leaders We Deserve” PAC and Samuel Moyn’s forthcoming book Gerontocracy in America, that says elderly, out-of-touch leaders like Chuck Grassley are behind a lot of the country’s problems. Certainly with people like Dianne Feinstein and Joe Biden, there’s a pattern of politicians staying in office long after it would have been sensible to retire. But you’ve got to be careful here, because the problem with these leaders is not only that they’re old. In general, age is a bad proxy for policy preferences, class allegiance, and even competence. The presumption behind the “gerontocracy” narrative is that younger equals more progressive, more worker-friendly, and that’s statistically likely, but not always true in individual cases. Even basic on-the-job ability varies. Bernie Sanders is old, though eight years Grassley’s junior, and he’s still doing (mostly) solid work. Ritchie Torres and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez are young, and they’re terrible. In Grassley’s case, the real problem is a more insidious combination of things. He hasn’t just been hanging on to power like a barnacle for decades, he’s also been making policy choices that directly harm the people of Iowa, and he’s been exhibiting some truly bizarre behavior along the way.
Congress is, as we know, essentially a group home for cranks, perverts, and the deranged. But even among that crowd, Grassley stands out. Like Donald Trump, he loves to post, and every time he goes online, he gives the world a glimpse into a lifestyle that can only be described as baffling. Take his longstanding devotion to Beth the vacuum cleaner. This is a 1987 Hoover Concept Two upright vacuum, which presumably used to be white-and-red, but thanks to the passage of time is now more beige-and-red. Not only has Senator Grassley named this vacuum cleaner “Beth,” which is weird and vaguely sexist by itself, but he feels the need to tell the world about it on every major holiday, like clockwork. “Once again Beth has performed wonderfully for family reunion If u knew Beth like I know Beth u would know the dependability I know,” he posted this August. Or, in April 2022: “Grassley to Beth: Sunday we hv our Easter family gathering are u ready to roll ?” Or last December: “Beth going to get Grassley farm house ready for 32 guest Christmas Day.” The man is obsessed.
Like a lot of older people, Grassley’s posting style is terse, full of abbreviations and run-on sentences, and somewhat incoherent. In a recent article, the Iowa-based Little Village described it as having “the start-stop, quiet-loud, herky-jerky quality of an E.E. Cummings poem.” The subjects, too, are odd. “Windsor Heights Dairy Queen is good place for u kno what,” the senator tweeted in 2014, causing a collective huh? to spread across the nation. He would repeat the sentiment the following year, writing that “I'm at the Jefferson Iowa DairyQueen doing ‘you know what’ !!!” Apparently, “you know what” just means “eating ice cream”—or at least, that’s the story he’s sticking to. (...)
Grassley is a fascinating figure, because you never know what you’re going to get next with him. And all of his corn and vacuum-related antics might be charming, if he didn’t have any political power, and was just somebody’s weird grandfather (or, at this point, great-grandfather). There’s an entire category of American political grotesques like this: figures who’ve been defined in the public eye by their personal strangeness and entertainment value, as much as their actual politics. Trump is another, with his constant stream of garbled utterances about the relative merits of death by shark vs. electrocution or how “nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen.” Or there’s RFK Jr. with his brain worms and quack cures, or even New York City’s favorite sons, Eric Adams and Curtis Sliwa. But the problem is, these people do have power. They control things like public health, the police, and the military, and they decide the outcomes of people’s lives. Like Sideshow Bob on The Simpsons, they’re a lot less funny when you realize they’re actually trying to harm you, and Chuck Grassley is no exception.
So what has Chuck Grassley done with his considerable power? When the curtain finally falls on his life and career, how will he be judged? Not well, if you’re an ordinary working-class Iowan. At every turn, Grassley has consistently made decisions that make their lives worse. (...)
Then, too, as head of the Senate Judiciary Committee Grassley had a major role in converting the Supreme Court to the openly right-wing institution it is today. Back in 2016, when he first led the committee, it was Grassley who delayed the vote on Merrick Garland’s confirmation to the Court until after the 2016 election, effectively stealing a seat from the outgoing Obama administration. Afterward, it was Grassley who was among the staunchest defenders of Brett Kavanaugh, even (and especially) after it became clear that Kavanaugh had lied to the American people about the sexual assault accusations brought against him by Christine Blasey Ford. So in a sense, all of the decisions that make up the Court’s post-2016 rightward turn—from the dismantling of women’s reproductive rights to the sweeping criminal immunity granted to Donald Trump—are Grassley’s handiwork.
Good news, though: if you’re a mentally ill person who wants to get a high-powered gun, Chuck Grassley is your best friend! One of his pet projects in 2017 was to repeal Obama-era regulations that prevented people from buying firearms if they had “mental impairments” so significant that they needed a third party to help them claim Social Security benefits. That seems like a rule even the most avid hunters and rifle collectors could agree with—if you can’t fill out a form unaided, you shouldn’t have a gun—but Grassley objected, claiming that the standards were too “vague” and that “if a specific individual is likely to be violent due to the nature of their mental illness, then the government should have to prove it” on a case-by-case basis. Never mind that, by the time the “proof” arrives, a school or a Walmart could be riddled with bullets and bloodstains.
This is who Chuck Grassley is. He makes decisions in Washington that ruin people’s lives, and then he flies back to Iowa to post incoherent gibberish about Dairy Queen online. The wacky grandpa image is a cloak for the deeper depravity. And his constituents know it. In 2021, only 28 percent of Iowans wanted him to run for re-election, with “the age thing” cited as the most common reason. More recently, Grassley’s town hall events have become outpourings of frustration against Republican policy: “I’M PISSED!” one man recently yelled at him, after he made a mumbling defense of the Trump administration shipping people to a gulag in El Salvador without due process. He spoke for millions.
Which leads to another, even grimmer question: why, in Grassley’s 45-year career in the Senate, have the Democrats never been able to unseat him? (...)
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the kind of leaders a system of government throws up in its dying days. You probably remember them from your high school history books. Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor of Rome, who ruled for only ten months before being deposed by the Barbarians (who found him so non-threatening they let him retire to a monastery). Kings Louis XIV through XVI in France, swanning around Versailles in their fur capes while the revolution was brewing outside. Nicholas II in Russia, letting Rasputin whisper in his ear as more and more of his people got blown to bits in World War I, while Lenin and Trotsky drew up battle plans of their own. Later, President Boris Yeltsin, who had crippling alcoholism even by Russian standards, to the extent he “wandered into the street in his underwear” during a state visit with Bill Clinton—and who played a key role in the downfall of the Soviet Union. In each era, the pattern is the same. The people in power are incompetent, corrupt, and personally contemptible, pale shadows of the leaders the country or system had at its peak—and yet, there seems to be no way to get rid of them.
Contrary to the “great man” (or rather “weak man”) theory of history, it’s not that these leaders cause the downfall of their regimes through their personal failings. Just the opposite. They’re not catalysts of decline, but morbid symptoms. The fact that they ever got near power is proof that the system itself is no longer functional. The mechanisms that are supposed to produce strong, effective leaders, from education to military promotion to party leadership contests, are no longer doing so. The skills and attributes needed to reach the top of the hierarchy no longer have much, if anything, to do with the skills and attributes needed to actually rule. Nepotism, mutual back-slapping, and financial corruption have taken hold, like rust. In the early 1800s, Napoleon was able to sweep across the map of Europe like a holy terror, in part because the ancien régime was still choosing military officers based on their noble bloodlines, while Napoleon only cared about effectiveness and would promote any old commoner who could win battles for him. Monarchy was dying, and the last things it belched up as it expired were tenth-generation, third-rate Hapsburg cousins, ripe for the slaughter. In the USSR, the bureaucracy elevated people based on how well they recited the Party line like a catechism, as much as their actual abilities. Thus, they eventually produced a Yeltsin.
And today in the United States, we have Chuck Grassley.
There’s a popular line of thinking, embodied in David Hogg’s “Leaders We Deserve” PAC and Samuel Moyn’s forthcoming book Gerontocracy in America, that says elderly, out-of-touch leaders like Chuck Grassley are behind a lot of the country’s problems. Certainly with people like Dianne Feinstein and Joe Biden, there’s a pattern of politicians staying in office long after it would have been sensible to retire. But you’ve got to be careful here, because the problem with these leaders is not only that they’re old. In general, age is a bad proxy for policy preferences, class allegiance, and even competence. The presumption behind the “gerontocracy” narrative is that younger equals more progressive, more worker-friendly, and that’s statistically likely, but not always true in individual cases. Even basic on-the-job ability varies. Bernie Sanders is old, though eight years Grassley’s junior, and he’s still doing (mostly) solid work. Ritchie Torres and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez are young, and they’re terrible. In Grassley’s case, the real problem is a more insidious combination of things. He hasn’t just been hanging on to power like a barnacle for decades, he’s also been making policy choices that directly harm the people of Iowa, and he’s been exhibiting some truly bizarre behavior along the way.
Like a lot of older people, Grassley’s posting style is terse, full of abbreviations and run-on sentences, and somewhat incoherent. In a recent article, the Iowa-based Little Village described it as having “the start-stop, quiet-loud, herky-jerky quality of an E.E. Cummings poem.” The subjects, too, are odd. “Windsor Heights Dairy Queen is good place for u kno what,” the senator tweeted in 2014, causing a collective huh? to spread across the nation. He would repeat the sentiment the following year, writing that “I'm at the Jefferson Iowa DairyQueen doing ‘you know what’ !!!” Apparently, “you know what” just means “eating ice cream”—or at least, that’s the story he’s sticking to. (...)
Grassley is a fascinating figure, because you never know what you’re going to get next with him. And all of his corn and vacuum-related antics might be charming, if he didn’t have any political power, and was just somebody’s weird grandfather (or, at this point, great-grandfather). There’s an entire category of American political grotesques like this: figures who’ve been defined in the public eye by their personal strangeness and entertainment value, as much as their actual politics. Trump is another, with his constant stream of garbled utterances about the relative merits of death by shark vs. electrocution or how “nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen.” Or there’s RFK Jr. with his brain worms and quack cures, or even New York City’s favorite sons, Eric Adams and Curtis Sliwa. But the problem is, these people do have power. They control things like public health, the police, and the military, and they decide the outcomes of people’s lives. Like Sideshow Bob on The Simpsons, they’re a lot less funny when you realize they’re actually trying to harm you, and Chuck Grassley is no exception.
So what has Chuck Grassley done with his considerable power? When the curtain finally falls on his life and career, how will he be judged? Not well, if you’re an ordinary working-class Iowan. At every turn, Grassley has consistently made decisions that make their lives worse. (...)
Then, too, as head of the Senate Judiciary Committee Grassley had a major role in converting the Supreme Court to the openly right-wing institution it is today. Back in 2016, when he first led the committee, it was Grassley who delayed the vote on Merrick Garland’s confirmation to the Court until after the 2016 election, effectively stealing a seat from the outgoing Obama administration. Afterward, it was Grassley who was among the staunchest defenders of Brett Kavanaugh, even (and especially) after it became clear that Kavanaugh had lied to the American people about the sexual assault accusations brought against him by Christine Blasey Ford. So in a sense, all of the decisions that make up the Court’s post-2016 rightward turn—from the dismantling of women’s reproductive rights to the sweeping criminal immunity granted to Donald Trump—are Grassley’s handiwork.
Good news, though: if you’re a mentally ill person who wants to get a high-powered gun, Chuck Grassley is your best friend! One of his pet projects in 2017 was to repeal Obama-era regulations that prevented people from buying firearms if they had “mental impairments” so significant that they needed a third party to help them claim Social Security benefits. That seems like a rule even the most avid hunters and rifle collectors could agree with—if you can’t fill out a form unaided, you shouldn’t have a gun—but Grassley objected, claiming that the standards were too “vague” and that “if a specific individual is likely to be violent due to the nature of their mental illness, then the government should have to prove it” on a case-by-case basis. Never mind that, by the time the “proof” arrives, a school or a Walmart could be riddled with bullets and bloodstains.
This is who Chuck Grassley is. He makes decisions in Washington that ruin people’s lives, and then he flies back to Iowa to post incoherent gibberish about Dairy Queen online. The wacky grandpa image is a cloak for the deeper depravity. And his constituents know it. In 2021, only 28 percent of Iowans wanted him to run for re-election, with “the age thing” cited as the most common reason. More recently, Grassley’s town hall events have become outpourings of frustration against Republican policy: “I’M PISSED!” one man recently yelled at him, after he made a mumbling defense of the Trump administration shipping people to a gulag in El Salvador without due process. He spoke for millions.
Which leads to another, even grimmer question: why, in Grassley’s 45-year career in the Senate, have the Democrats never been able to unseat him? (...)
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the kind of leaders a system of government throws up in its dying days. You probably remember them from your high school history books. Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor of Rome, who ruled for only ten months before being deposed by the Barbarians (who found him so non-threatening they let him retire to a monastery). Kings Louis XIV through XVI in France, swanning around Versailles in their fur capes while the revolution was brewing outside. Nicholas II in Russia, letting Rasputin whisper in his ear as more and more of his people got blown to bits in World War I, while Lenin and Trotsky drew up battle plans of their own. Later, President Boris Yeltsin, who had crippling alcoholism even by Russian standards, to the extent he “wandered into the street in his underwear” during a state visit with Bill Clinton—and who played a key role in the downfall of the Soviet Union. In each era, the pattern is the same. The people in power are incompetent, corrupt, and personally contemptible, pale shadows of the leaders the country or system had at its peak—and yet, there seems to be no way to get rid of them.
Contrary to the “great man” (or rather “weak man”) theory of history, it’s not that these leaders cause the downfall of their regimes through their personal failings. Just the opposite. They’re not catalysts of decline, but morbid symptoms. The fact that they ever got near power is proof that the system itself is no longer functional. The mechanisms that are supposed to produce strong, effective leaders, from education to military promotion to party leadership contests, are no longer doing so. The skills and attributes needed to reach the top of the hierarchy no longer have much, if anything, to do with the skills and attributes needed to actually rule. Nepotism, mutual back-slapping, and financial corruption have taken hold, like rust. In the early 1800s, Napoleon was able to sweep across the map of Europe like a holy terror, in part because the ancien régime was still choosing military officers based on their noble bloodlines, while Napoleon only cared about effectiveness and would promote any old commoner who could win battles for him. Monarchy was dying, and the last things it belched up as it expired were tenth-generation, third-rate Hapsburg cousins, ripe for the slaughter. In the USSR, the bureaucracy elevated people based on how well they recited the Party line like a catechism, as much as their actual abilities. Thus, they eventually produced a Yeltsin.
And today in the United States, we have Chuck Grassley.
by Alex Skopic, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Good point. In my experience, once an incumbent wins a couple elections they're almost impossible to unseat. Seen it all my life: out of sight, out of mind (in DC).]
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